A Blog About the Bible, Catholicism and the Habit of Study

Monthly Archives: November 2009

You may know from viewing the persons in my blog’s sidebar that I am a fan of the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure. You may not know that his complete works (his opera omnia, if you will) has been scanned by Google and placed online in Google books and on the new Hathi Trust Digital Library where you can download PDF’s of the full non-critical Quaracchi Latin edition of his works. These books are very expensive and hard to find and it is an absolute joy to me that they are now online and freely available to all. Of course, if you don’t read Latin, you’ll still have to buy a translation, but perhaps, Google translate will come out with a Latin-English function. We can all hope.

I was amused by Ratzinger’s comment on classical music and I thought you would be too:

“Modern so-called ‘classical music’ has maneuvered itself, with some exceptions, into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter–and even they do so with what may sometimes be mixed feelings.”

If you have ever sat through an entire performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or a Bartok String Quartet (as I have) or even the ridiculous “composition” 4’33 by John Cage, you know exactly what he’s talking about.